


le chant de la forêt

by ladysisyphus



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:46:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're having me on."</p>
            </blockquote>





	le chant de la forêt

**Author's Note:**

> So once upon a time [**neomeruru**](http://neomeruru.livejournal.com/) threatened to draw a male bellydancing viera and I said that if she did I'd totally write a story.
> 
> [So she did](http://neomeruru.livejournal.com/300542.html), so I did! And I gave it the same title as her picture because I am layzeeeee

"You're having me on."

The dusk breeze blew cool over the wings of the _Strahl_ \-- to his general astonishment, it had retained that nomenclature, erasing any doubt in his mind that there was a force in the universe more definitive than Fran when she'd put her enormous foot down -- and Ffamran loosed the buttons at the throat of his shirt that he might better enjoy it. His hands and most of his sleeves were stained with a dark, slick liquid, but he'd managed to correct a major error in the hydraulics system, an hours-long task, and would see to the business of ablutions just as soon as he felt enough energy return to his limbs to get him safely to the ground.

Fran, looking as breezy and effortless as ever she did, despite how the lion's share of the project's heavy lifting had fallen upon her powerful arms, clucked her tongue in the way that meant she couldn't believe _he_ couldn't believe her. "For days at a time, each." Still, Ffamran was at least _somewhat_ gratified to see that he was not the only victim of exhaustion, as she too had chosen to recline along the sun-warmed metal arm, her cheek resting light against its smooth surface, her body bent at the waist to accommodate the design's gentle curve.

Ffamran folded his arms across his chest in a defiant gesture, hoping that biting the inside of his mouth would keep his face from betraying the way his muscles ached. "You are taking advantage of my receptive, potentially credulous state, and that is cruel."

"They keep the world in motion by the dance. Their perpetual movement forms the font of all magicks." Fran stretched a hand out into the distance between them, made a pose with her hand of touching her thumb to her longest finger, and began to rock her hand back in forth on her wrist; presently, small trails of fey light began to trail along behind, marking the places she had been, softly brilliant in the coming dark. "If they were to stop--" She fisted her hand tight, and the light vanished as surely as though it had been a candle she'd snuffed, leaving no hint of itself remaining. "The great sky-stones would fail, the metal birds of humes would drop from the air as though they were real birds that had been felled by shot, the Wood would begin to rot and fester even as it still stood tied to the fertile earth, and the world would be plunged into a great dying darkness."

Ffamran listened as she spoke, let the enormity of her words carry him as they ever did, transfix him with their magnitude and the soft lilt of her precise speech, bring him along with her wherever she went, until every story was good as gospel -- and then he was having none of it, and with an undignified grunt, he flopped soundly onto his back. " _Last_ week, you told me they were ravenous warriors that consume hume flesh raw."

Fran's left ear twitched slightly. "Did I?" With a brief exhale of disbelief, she shut her eyes. "That hardly sounds something I would say."

"You _did_." He slapped the surface of the _Strahl_ 's wing as a percussive aid to his argument. "And the week before _that_ you told me they didn't exist at _all_ , and when you were telling me about their orgiastic cannibalistic rites -- mind you, which I could, despite your utter inability to tell a story with anything but the _most_ vague and speculative of all details, even at this moment recall to the letter, lest your memory be as faulty as you accuse mine of being -- you asserted that the reason you'd misled me in the first place was not out of any desire to deceive, but because you wanted to make sure my constitution was hardy enough that knowing ther true nature would not condemn me to a life of night terrors!"

Upon finishing his allegations, he paused a moment, as was only proper to allow her some rejoinder; but there came none, and presently he was so baffled by her silence that he exerted the effort to raise his head and look at her. What he saw clear, even in the near-gone light from the hour-set sun, was that her ears were gone slack atop one another, her extended hand lay loose with its palm upturned and long fingers curled slightly in, and her chest rose and fell with the even tidal rhythm of sleep.

With a sigh accompanied by an exaggerated rolling of his eyes -- for his own benefit, of course, as hers were still tightly shut, but it made him feel better in a petty fashion -- he slid his body toward the lowest edge of the wing. "I'll wash up and make dinner," he announced, speaking at a volume that showed neither respect for nor true belief in her slumbering state. "You'll wake for bacon." He thought he heard her stir behind him, but did not dignify his suspicion by looking back, and instead lowered his aching self to the ground, resolving never to take her word on anything again, and all the while knowing that resolution to be as false as every time he'd made it before.


End file.
